In an article on Vox late last week, David Roberts critiqued "The quasi-libertarian anti-politics of the tech nerd," by way of Tim Urban's Wait But Why blog, and specifically Urban's recent three-part series prompted by Elon Musk. Roberts excoriated nerd culture at large (with Urban's writing providing the case in point) for claiming an intellectual and moral superiority that, in politics at least according to Roberts, is based on faulty premises. In particular, Roberts took aim at the "myth-encrusted" notions of political independence, moderation, and non-partisanship, as ideas that simply don't hold water when you examine them in the rigorous manner on which nerd culture prides itself - nerd culture, again, as defined by Urban's in-depth exploration of a variety of often quite technical subjects, in a manner that leaves the reader "sated, like you just learned the shit out of something, like you get something in a way you didn't before."NYT columnist Paul Krugman through a little fuel on the fire the next day, critiquing Roberts for failing to take aim at the why of this kind of mass oversight: "just lecturing Silicon Valley types on the need to get serious about politics won’t work if there are deeper reasons smart people get stupid when politics enters the picture." We do all get a little stupid sometimes. [via Vox.com]

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Last week, Andreessen Horowitz' Benedict Evans asked us to change the way we think about cars, arguing that the shift to electric reduces the mechanical complexity of the automobile, that on-demand driving and car service changes patterns in ownership (and thus the characteristics of successful products), and that cars should be smartened by smart phones rather than having the smart built in. This week, we saw some validation of his arguments when Consumer Reports released a review of Tesla's Model S P85D, rating the electric car 103 on a 100-point scale. This is a car that gets the equivalent of 85 miles to the gallon and goes from 0 to 60 in just 3.5 seconds; it carries a hefty pricetag, but it's still one step closer to the normalization of electric automobiles. In news more directly relevant to the middle classes, Uber announced "smart routes," their re-interpretation of a taxi-bus hybrid that has the potential to disrupt public transit as much as they've already impacted taxi service. [via TechCrunch]